A Corporeal History of the 19th Century

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By Leah Price

March 16, 2018

VICTORIANS UNDONE Tales of the Flesh in the Age of DecorumBy Kathryn Hughes Illustrated. 414 pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. $29.95.

The average biographer peers into a Great Man’s mind. Kathryn Hughes’s “Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum,” in contrast, narrates the lives of five body parts: the stomach of one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, “suspected of expecting”; Charles Darwin’s unfashionable beard, which turns out to provide a key to his theory of sexual selection; George Eliot’s right hand, larger than her left thanks to a youth spent milking cows; the “bee-stung” lips of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s mistress; and the dismembered corpse of a working-class girl onto whose severed foot a late-19th-century shoemaker stumbled in a Hampshire hop garden.

While microhistorians have long zoomed in on individual case studies, Hughes pinpoints her subjects even more narrowly. Her method is laparoscopic, sectioning off bits of bodies as ruthlessly as did the Hampshire murderer. Her ultimate question, though, is a broad one: How did the Victorians understand the interplay between mind and body?

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Consider Darwin’s beard — or, more precisely, beards, since Darwin’s progress through decades and hemispheres was marked by growing, grooming and shaving off a series of different styles. Mustachioed hipsters may be happy to learn that facial hair spent the first half of the 19th century as the marker of rabble-rousers, artists and derelicts. It was only when Crimean War veterans set the fashion that experts began recommending beards to ward off frostbite, sunburn and air pollution, not to mention mumps and toothache. A beard could also hide a man’s unmanly expressions of emotion.

Darwin himself supplemented his erstwhile comb-over late in life, after realizing that a morning shave exacerbated his eczema. And beardedness continues to flatter him in the 21st century. In 2000, Darwin replaced Dickens on 10-pound notes — one reason, Hughes reveals, was that the naturalist’s extravagant whorls of hair are harder to forge than the “door knocker” the weak-chinned Dickens grew after the rise of photography made it impossible for him to avoid being depicted in profile. (Until recently, when Darwin was himself replaced by Jane Austen, if you’d taken a tenner out of your wallet you’d have seen the hirsute naturalist looking uncannily like an ape.) Struggling to explain where beards fit into his theory of sexual selection, Darwin posited that because facial hair is lighter than the hair on men’s heads, “our male apelike progenitors acquired their beards as an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex” — the equivalent of a peacock’s tail.

From Civil War re-enactments to paleo diets, today’s subcultures often try to recreate the bodies of bygone eras; but rather than celebrating Victorian heads and hands and waistlines, Hughes rubs our noses in their strangeness. She interweaves the Victorians’ writings about body image with their nonverbal habits — whether they groomed themselves or paid a barber for a shave, what muscles they used to lift a pail or squeeze an udder.

Don’t let the title fool you: This is not a book about sex. Rarely lustful or repressed, these Victorians were more often embarrassed, uncomfortable, self-conscious or vain. Hughes’s blow-by-blow accounts of bowel movements, menstruation, menopause, pores and salivary glands shouldn’t be mistaken for celebrity gossip or scatological humor — though it takes guts, so to speak, to depict courtiers fat-shaming one another and guesstimating who had missed a period. Instead, her focus on the body topples great figures from their pedestals. We hear less about the words that emerged from Victoria’s mouth than about her failure to zip her lips while chewing; nothing about the visionary images sparked by Coleridge’s opium addiction, but plenty about his resulting constipation. Made rather than given, these bodies tell an engrossing story about the culture that fashioned them.

Correction:

An earlier version of this review misstated the book’s American publisher. It is Johns Hopkins University Press, not HarperCollins.

Leah Price teaches English at Harvard. Her latest book, “Overbooked: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Reading Wars,” will be published later this year.